Jack White stepped up for the halftime show as his home team Detroit Lions took on the Green Bay Packers during their Thanksgiving NFL fixture – and he roasted Ford Field like it was a turkey.
This was a set that gave us all we could have wanted from a stadium show, and all in a lean seven-and-a-half minutes. No messing. Here we are now, entertain us.
For those who were there, this was 12 minutes well spent. Time to get a hot dog, visit the restroom, come back and watch White tear into That’s How I’m Feeling. Then, he welcomed fellow Detroiter Eminem onstage – like, from nowhere – to turn the sassy grind of Hello Operator into 'Till I Collapse. He used his Fender Triplecaster signature guitar in Detroit Lions blue, before swapping it out for his ‘50s Kay hollowbody for the MVP of garage-rock-meets-sports crossover jams, Seven Nation Army.
Just watching it on YouTube is surreal enough. Imagine being there. There were cheerleaders throwing themselves around. There was White’s band in coach jackets. There was a trio of Pano Verb tube amps (good luck finding one down your local store as no one can keep up with demand).
A note on White's slide playing: there are others who are more subtle with a tube of machined brass on their pinkie, more silky with the whole glissando thing, but White uses it for pure anarchy. It's like a manual workaround for when your DigiTech Whammy is on the fritz.
Deep in the bowels of the stadium, the players are chugging Gatorade and pounding trays of orange slices and Uncrustables, and up there, Jack White is all but turning into electricity itself.
Maybe, just maybe, he was making a point, too. A while back, people were criticising him for short sets, and, in a manner of speaking, accusing him of being work shy. Like, Coldplay are doing three hours… [Yikes!] White said they were missing the point.
It says something about our current pop-cultural moment when one of our latter-day greats has to explain what a rock ’n’ roll show is about but here we are.
“We’re living in a current era where people like to say ‘So and so played for three hours last night!’, and brag about it the next day,” wrote White. “You’re talking about an arena laser light show with pyro, huge screens with premade videos, singers flying over the crowd, [and] t-shirt cannons – that’s not the kind of shows we’re performing.
“I’ve seen a plethora of rock and roll gigs that lasted 45 minutes and blew my mind and inspired me beyond belief.”
And now we might have seen one that did that in a fifth of that time. There is always something gratifying about seeing White's gear, the spare Triplecasters, that beat-up old Kay, just waiting there behind him in reserve.
One YouTube commentator put it best: “It was nice of the Lions and Packers to have a football game at the Jack White concert”.
